Emma Kaplon is a student in Georgetown University’s joint M.A./J.D. program, pursuing her M.A. in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies alongside her J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center. Originally from Sacramento, California, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 with dual B.A. degrees in Russian Language and Culture and English and Comparative Literature.
At UNC, she participated in the Russian Flagship Program and studied abroad in Yerevan, Armenia through the Advanced Russian Language and Area Studies Program and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. During her undergraduate studies, she served as the inaugural Human Rights Fellow at OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights organization, where she translated and localized reporting on political persecution, interviewed anti-war artists, and contributed to legal advocacy and public education efforts. She also worked with Freedom Letters, an exile publishing house focused on literature banned in Russia, supporting the distribution of censored books and researching funding opportunities for literary translation. Most recently, during her first year in the CERES program, Emma worked on the legal portfolio at the U.S.-Russia Foundation. She supported projects focused on protecting the rule of law and access to justice in Russia, including initiatives addressing political persecution and imprisonment, domestic violence, and the rights of Indigenous communities.
Her academic interests center on human rights, freedom of expression, political repression, and the experiences of communities affected by conflict and displacement across Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At Georgetown, she is a Global Law Scholar and a member of the Human Rights Associates Program, focusing on international human rights law in Eurasia. She chose CERES to deepen her regional and Russian-language expertise and develop a more nuanced understanding of the political, historical, and social contexts underlying the human rights issues she hopes to address through her legal career.